Cancer patient says he was covered in bugs on gurney at Henry Ford Hospital

DETROIT (FOX 2) - Tyrone Foster went to Henry Ford Hospital for chest and neck pain, but he says he felt worse when bugs covered his body after he got there. Now he has hired a lawyer and will be filing a claim against the hospital.

"What happened was, I laid down in the bed and its bugs everywhere," he said.

Foster, a cancer patient, is still bugging out over his visit to Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit back in May. Someone's wet, bug infested clothing was left under the mattress of his gurney.

Foster fell asleep on top of it, waiting for test results and woke up to either bed bugs or lice crawling all over his body, most on his stomach near his peg tube.

"What folks have to understand is his immune system is very low because of his condition," said attorney Arnold Reed. "If any of those bugs had have somehow got into his peg tube or infected him, he could have died."

Foster is now taking legal action against the hospital, retaining attorney Arnold Reed who filed a notice of intent on his behalf, the first step towards a lawsuit.

"Imagine if you will that he hadn't taken pictures, if he hadn't have had his cell phone," Reed said. "There's nobody on God's green earth that would've believed this would've happened in a hospital. And you know what, they would've denied it."

Ty Wade, Tyrone Foster's daughter says, in a sense, they initially did. Staffers tried to blame her dad for bringing the bugs in.

"Just thinking back on what happened it's horrifying," Wade said. "And the things he had to go through and that he had to call me up there and even when I got there they weren't willing to give me answers."

"As we stated when this first happened, we are sincerely sorry this happened and expressed that to the patient and his family immediately that day. This was caused by infested, wet clothing that had been concealed under the mattress on a gurney in our Emergency Department. We have no evidence the clothing was placed there by one of our team members. This was an isolated incident, no other patients were affected, and we've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. We are confident we can reach an amicable resolution of this matter."

Reed has been in talks with the hospital and says their response so far have been lukewarm at best, and that has left Foster fuming.

"They're going to have to come correct, they're going to have to apologize to my client and they're going to have to make this right," he said. "Otherwise, we are going to go as far as we need to go. We'll go to the highest court. The court of last resort in the state of Michigan."

Henry Ford has five months formally to respond to the legal filing and a month and a half to give up any and all records regarding what happened there. The hospital has said this was an isolated incident.